Redaction: Dark Hope Part III

by Linda Andrews

  The boulder began to roll toward Eddie. He caught it and pushed it back. “Almost there.”

  Papa Rose eyed the ground. The crooked top of the bar nearly touched the ground.

  The rock wiggled a bit asEddie shifted his weight. “I’m free.”

  With a sigh of relief, Papa Rose released the pry bar. The boulder landed with a thump that echoed through the tunnel. “Is your leg broken?”

  Eddie shone the light on his boots. Damp laces slapped worn leather. He flexed his feet then rotated them at the ankles. “Nope. I’m good.”

  The guy was lucky. Then again, so was he. They were in the lower tunnels, right near the atom splitters. Papa Rose pushed to his feet. His joints popped. “You’re going to have a helluva bruise.”

  He was already one big bruise. Getting old sucked. He held out his hand.

  “I have someone who’ll kiss it and make it better.” After looping the bag’s handle over his head, Eddie slid his callused palm against his. “We need to go check on Forrest and report in to the Doc.”

  Forrest. The other man. Papa Rose braced his feet, leaned back and hauled Eddie up so he could stand. “How many flashlights does Forrest have?”

  “Dude, you’re off base there.” Eddie took a step on his right leg and collapsed to his knee. “Fuckin’ A.”

  Push his buttons, see if he cracks and bleeds psycho. Papa Rose worked the pry bar free and bit his lip to keep from chuckling. “Did you mean to do that?”

  “Just help me up.”

  “Tell me about Forrest.” Papa Rose crouched, dragged Eddie’s arm across his shoulders and pushed up.

  “Not much to tell.” Eddie’s fingers dug deep when he put a little weight on his right leg. The flashlight bounced as they three-legged walked toward the metal door fifty feet away.

  “Then how do you know he’s not a flashlight klepto?”

  “The dude doesn’t stop talking. I’m sure he’s told me his whole life story by now, but he doesn’t speak English so I can only understand every other word.”

  An outsider? Some folks had been less than welcoming to the refugees. Was that the motivation behind the thefts? “Where’s he from?”

  “Somerset, England.” Eddie shone the light on the rivets of the metal wall. The Royal Air Force emblem stared back at them. Bolts connected the repurposed plane fuselage piece to the metal ribs on both sides, sealing the electrolysis chamber from the rest of the tunnel.

  “England?” Papa Rose snorted. “You do know why it’s called English, right? Because it originated there.”

  “Yeah, well, you listen to him. I know that’s not English.” Eddie tapped his finger on the metal. He held the contact a little longer each time. “The door is warm.”

  Papa Rose brushed his hand over it. Heat seared his callused tips. “That’s fucking hot.”

  Eddie bit his lip. “Guess we know where the blast came from.”

  Shit. Shit. Shit! He had his fill of counseling today. “Your friend might not be in there.”

  “He wouldn’t leave his post for anything.”

  Devotion to duty should be rewarded, not penalized. Papa Rose scrubbed his hand down his face. He knew he shouldn’t have gotten out of bed this morning. “How long do we have to wait until the fire goes out?”

  Eddie cleared his throat. “It should be out already. In case of an explosion, we designed the water basin to release and douse any fire.” Pushing his jacket sleeve over his hand, he pulled up on the lever.

  Papa Rose’s hair fluttered from the air rushing inside.

  “Forrest? Are you in here?” The hinges protested as the door opened.

  The scent of charred meat hung heavy on the air.

  Eddie’s flashlight danced over the wreckage—shredded fifty-five gallon drums, twisted pipes, black-coated wires, diamond shards of glass, and a charred leg sticking out of the debris. The spotlight paused there before drifting to the scorch marks. The explosion’s epicenter was smack dab in the middle of the room. Was that where they’d kept the atom splitter?

  “Do you smell gunpowder?”

  Papa Rose sniffed. Death smells and… A chemical smell hit the back of his throat, nearly dropping him to his knees. With whiplash speed, he crossed time and distance returning to the Sandbox, to the IED that hit his convoy, and to Carter’s death scene. “Not gunpowder. C-4.”

  Chapter Three

  One by one, flashlights popped on like stars in a velvet sky. Blue tinged the white as laptops and tablets added to the illumination. Draping from the ceiling, silver emergency blankets amplified the light, kept the heat in the cave and channeled the ever-present dripping water to the canals on the side of the room.

  “Is anyone hurt?” Doctor Mavis Spanner rested her tablet computer on the table in front of her. She scanned the dimness, searching the faces. Fear bracketed mouths. Anger knotted the brows of others. No face relayed pain, just irritation at the constant downtime from the overtaxed electrolysis machines. “Anyone?”

  Most of the two dozen people shrugged. A few crossed their arms and thrust their jaws forward.

  Her stomach burbled. Acid shot into her esophagus. Not now, she couldn’t be sick. They lost enough people to hopelessness and despair. God knew how many more would walk outside or mangle their wrists with plastic cutlery if they thought the influenza had returned.

  Mavis straightened her spine. Any more setbacks in front of this lot would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The advancements in the last two months hadn’t been fast enough or comfortable enough.

  “No injuries. Good.” Mavis found former Marine Corps General Lister by the phone and pinned him with a stare. “Any news?”

  A scowl enhanced the bulldog qualities of his face as he hung up the phone. “Electrolysis machines one and two are online. Three is off. No one has heard from the operator of EM-3.”

  Mavis recorded the incidents on her tablet. Eddie Buchanan had started his new duties today. Maybe he and his coworker, Charles Forrest, had taken the machine down for training purposes.

  “Oh, look.” A red-hair man checked the freckle on his right arm. “It’s a day of the week. Must be time for one of the atom splitters to blow.”

  Chuckles alleviated some of the tension of the blackout.

  Too bad the joker was Kevin Harriman. Mavis’s attention drifted to the man on Kevin’s right, Dirk Benedict. Those two were up to something. She just had to wait for her new peacekeeping force to prove it.

  “Let’s get on with the meeting.” Scraping the marker off her desk, she trudged across the hard rock floor, in front of the dark monitors linking them to other survivors around the globe, toward the whiteboard on an easel. Her footsteps echoed around the bowl-shaped room despite her loafers’ soft soles.

  Behind the easel stretched a long map, detailing their underground home. Thirteen levels deep and over six miles wide, the network riddled through several mountains like an ant colony.

  “No.” Kevin pounded his fist on the table in front of him. “I’m sick of this business as usual bullshit.”

  The overhead lights flickered on and the camera mounted on a tripod in front of her cabinet members blinked on.

  She swallowed the bits of sausage breakfast that remained in her stomach after her morning vomitfest. “We have an agenda, so the most pressing needs of the community will get addressed, Mr. Harriman. If you have something—”

  “When is something going to change for the better?” Kevin pushed out of his chair.

  “Things already have changed for the better.” Her new Surgeon General, Colonel John Jay adjusted the wire rim glasses on his nose. “Thanks to the planning by Mavis, the late Surgeon General Miles Arnez and thousands of military personnel, we have furniture, equipment and supplies to last us for generations.”

  “We owe a huge debt to many unnamed heroes.” She smiled in gratitude. What packed the caves was nothing compared to the cars, trucks and semis sealed tight outside. Before the radiation climbed to dangerous levels, t
he soldiers and civilians had swarmed the nearby towns like locusts. They’d stripped stores of their stock to the shelves then packed the shelves up too and branched out to pioneer museums, libraries and homes.

  Then there were the boxcars.

  Fortunately, the mine had a rail line for the ore and outbuildings still in good shape. Miles had stocked trainloads with MREs, heavy-duty equipment, greenhouses, solar panels and a medical station NASA had designed for Mars. Everyone had braved the mounting radiation to move the necessities inside and to travel to the cities to fill them again, and again.

  “We wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable if the military hadn’t been able to pick up bases and relocate them in a matter of days.” They had provided the survivors with cots, blankets, lights, phones, computers, toilets, kitchens and portable buildings. All they had to do was link the ready-made greenhouses with boxcars and make everything airtight.

  Kevin’s nostrils flared. “We had all that two months ago. And we’ve achieved nothing else since then.”

  Dr. Jay smoothed his blue jacket with its stylized Air Force wings, cleared his throat and glanced down at the tablet computer on the folding table in front of him. “Our population is holding steady at one-thousand twenty-two. No one died last night. That’s an amazing accomplishment.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Metal screeched as Secretary of Homeland Security Lister scooted a folding chair near the phone and sat. “We did it.”

  Mavis’s knees threatened to buckle. She locked them to remain upright. That meant… Fluttering filled her stomach. Could it be over? Could the dying really be over?

  Then why was she sick?

  Whoops bounced off the ceiling, rippling off the silvery fabric draped over the meeting room. Pale limbs swayed as high fives passed around the cavern.

  “Thank God.” Mavis carefully set the eraser back on its ledge. Bile rose in her throat. “And we have no outbreaks? Rocky Mountain Fever? Plague? Typhoid?”

  “Sweet Mother of God, woman. Stop poking the rabid badger.” Lister shoved out of his seat and stalked around his folding table. “I say we burn that damn eraser. From now on the only way to go is up.”

  Up. Mavis nodded. “Up would be good.”

  Unless it was her breakfast. That needed to stay put. Ditto with her lunch this afternoon.`

  Kevin snorted. “How are we going to increase our population when nothing you’ve done so far has made us safer?”

  “We’re safe from the radiation.” Colonel Jay polished his lenses on his shirt hem.

  Lister cleared his throat. “And we have MREs for fifty years.”

  “The military controls them and everything else.” Kevin snorted. Two of the twenty civilians filling the tables in front of her cabinet nodded. Dirk Benedict and Nancy Adler.

  All three were from Section Seven—an area that had forced out foreign-born refugees, threatened the new peacekeepers and had the highest ratio of sick-days per person.

  They were the rotten apples in the barrel—an airtight barrel with few ways to mitigate their poisonous influence. Mavis scrubbed her palms over her face. She hadn’t survived the end of the world to allow freedom to be subsumed by a caste system. “The supplies that we have are distributed fairly.”

  “This is communism.” Kevin braced himself on his knuckles and leaned over the table. “Everyone gets the same treatment regardless of how hard they work and how important their jobs are to our survival.”

  “You benefit from that system, Mr. Harriman.” More than he deserved, given his lack of input.

  Kevin snorted. “By constant blackouts. Having our oxygen cut off. And now you can’t even keep our vegetables safe. So much for your utopia.”

  Mavis forced her curled fingers to relax. She was sure the man knew more than she did about the stolen food.

  “This isn’t utopia by any means.” Otherwise some folks wouldn’t have been invited inside. “Working together, people here and around the planet have found solutions to our problems and a means to implement them with our supplies on hand. We can’t go to the grocery store and pick up food, nor can we go the Home Depot and get supplies. There is a finite amount of materials available. We have to prioritize and make the best use of them.”

  Unfortunately not everyone wanted to help or looked after anyone’s interests but their own.

  She glanced at Kevin’s neighbor. Dirk Benedict had the physique and smile of Santa Claus, but the temperament of a Pit Bull with a spike in its paw. She would rather deal with the Pit Bull.

  Wounded animals would be more predictable.

  “When are we going to stop surviving and start living?” Spittle foamed in the corners of Kevin’s mouth.

  “Most of us already have, Mr. Harriman. If you are having difficulties adjusting, perhaps you should speak to our counselors. We wouldn’t want you to walk outside and acquire an unfortunate tan.” As appealing as that would be, every person counted. Unfortunately, she already had a surplus of bad examples.

  “No way. You already have spy cameras everywhere.” Kevin gestured to the modems that connected the people in the tunnels, caves and mines. “I’m not letting you inside my head.”

  Asshole. She shook off her thoughts. Time to get the meeting back on track. “What is the prognosis for the irradiated survivors Brother Bob rescued?”

  Colonel Jay worked his earpieces back into place before dropping to his seat. “Two are hours away from slipping into shock, but the other three will recover.”

  To get leukemia and cancer later. Mavis dusted her hands on her jeans. But they would have a few more years living in a dark, wet and cold cave.

  Never to feel the sunlight on their face.

  God, she missed the sunlight. Mavis trudged across the man-made cavern and dropped into her seat. Fatigue pulled at her. Maybe one day, she’d see it again. She tapped the tablet and the screen blinked to life. Maybe she wouldn’t have to live to be a hundred-thirty-two to do it. “Are they safe enough to move?”

  “The three survivors are no longer emitting any radiation.” Colonel Jay pinched the bridge of his nose. “The other two will have to be interred in the vault.”

  The vault. A partially collapsed mine several miles from them that served as their crypt. Mavis sighed. The poor souls must have been exposed to high levels of radiation if they’d be emitting becquerels long after death. She shoved her bangs out of her eyes. She should have told people about the meltdown in her evacuation orders. Should have but hadn’t. Doubting herself wouldn’t change anything.

  People needed her to have the answers, to be certain of their course. And she’d give them that for the next three years. Then, they should be on better footing, and she could turn over the reins to someone else.

  Kevin’s chair screeched as he plopped onto it. “I suppose those dead are taking up our limited medical supplies too.”

  Ignoring him, she pulled up the agenda on her tablet. Using the stylus, she penned in the population. One thousand twenty-two and holding. Such good news. Not even a mishap in the electrolysis systems could diminish that victory. She eyed the ribbons near the vents. Especially since the oxygen kept flowing. “What’s the status of the spent nuclear fuel rods?”

  “According to satellite infrared, Kansas is the only U.S. repository still burning.” Lister tapped his screen.

  Pings sounded around the room as his message was dispersed to the gathered crowd.

  An envelope popped up on her desktop. Mavis clicked it. A global map oozed across her screen. Red striped mountain ranges bisected the yellows and oranges covering most of Europe. Not a cold blue spot on the continent.

  “Europe is still burning, I see.” She scanned the display. The white spots indicating the burning fuel rods had vanished. Unfortunately, the conventional fires could have used up the oxygen and those rods could start burning once it became available again. “Have we heard from anyone in the European Union lately?”

  Lieutenant Sally Rogers shifted on the chair next to Colonel Jay. As
their tech guru, she kept the caves wired and connected to the world. “Their populations are still dwindling, but they’re using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen so they have air to breathe.”

  Mavis nodded. “Food is still in short supply I see.”

  Suicide missions had raided America’s overseas bases for the last stores of MREs and still it hadn’t been enough to feed those hiding in the hills, mines and mountains of Europe. Reports of cannibalism ran rampant. There as well as in scattered areas across the globe.

  No wonder some folks took their chances outside.

  Including here, in the good ol’ US of A. She checked the population of the Japanese refugees in California. Still decreasing. What was going on over there? They should have had plenty of MREs and their last anthrax-related death had been a week ago.

  Too bad the satellites couldn’t show her what was going on inside pockets of humanity riddling the Sierra Nevadas or Cascade Mountains.

  “You think they ate the puny ones first?” Dirk Benedict’s voice carried to the front of the room.

  Lister stiffened and pinned Benedict with a glare. The man didn’t even have the decency to blush.

  Mavis cleared her throat and studied her screen. With everyone that had been lost, why did cretins like him survive?

  Lister picked at the scab on his freshly shaven cheek. “Why have we gone from the nuclear fuel rods burning for decades to being gone within weeks?”

  “Maybe they never really burned,” Dirk whispered.

  Mavis squared her shoulders. Bastard. He knew everyone heard him. She raised her chin and faced him. “If you don’t believe the radiation is real, Mr. Benedict, you’re welcome to stay in the isolation ward or live outside.”

  Dirk crossed his arms over his distended belly and glared at her from under bushy eyebrows.

  “After a couple hours with our terminal patients, you’ll start to feel nauseous, then begin to vomit. Then you’ll have a headache, fever and diarrhea.” Mavis drummed her fingers on the table. Hmm, she had some of those symptoms. Had she been exposed recently? “If you’re still not a believer, you can stay until your central nervous system begins to degrade. By then, you’ll have no immune system and your body will start to rot from the inside out. I understand worms and maggots emerged from the mouths of the victims of Chernobyl at the end.”